Crimson Spear (Blood and Sand Book 1)

by Jon Kiln

  “No. He may be, but we are not,” Suriyen said, her forehead in her hands.

  “What do you mean?” Aldameda looked at her as if she had sprouted wings. “Are you placing limits on what we friends can do?”

  “No, of course not. But we preserve life. That is what we do. How can we condemn an innocent man to die for something that is holding him hostage?”

  “All men die,” Aldameda said heavily. “And how do we know that he is innocent? What do we know of what really happened back there in Tir? Who took the devil, who gave it, and why? This Vekal of yours might be a willing participant. He might relish the power that the devil bestows upon him. The gods alone know just how he is still walking, given the state of his body’s injuries. It would be reasonable to suggest that he knows that the devil is keeping his body alive, and is grateful for that.”

  “Give him the herb,” said a tearful voice by the door of the courtyard. It was Talon, who had disobeyed Suriyen’s orders and walked out to find them, brandishing the long dagger in front of him. Suriyen had no idea just how long he had been standing there, and what he might have heard, but it was too late now.

  “Talon,” she acknowledged.

  “The herb. The one that the old woman said was keeping it under control. You remember, Suriyen? That night that he tried to rescue me from the gypsies?”

  “Herb? What herb, child?” Aldameda said sharply.

  “Devil’s Bane. The gypsy matriarch had seen the devil in Vekal and was using it to suppress the demon.” Suriyen drew the pouch from where it had hung around her chest and showed the older woman. “I hadn’t had a chance to talk to you about it, whether it would drive it out of him, or whether the demon would resist it.”

  Aldameda shrugged, putting her weapons away and snatching at the strange wort and sniffing it. “I will have to ask my contacts, but it may do. Actually….” She looked thoughtfully into the middle distance. “Perhaps that is not such a bad idea after all. We might be able to drive it out, and then entrap the spirit and send it back to its lowest hells.” She was sucking and clicking her teeth. “Hm. Yes. I know just the occultist who could help. Thank you, boy.” She gave Talon a bright smile, and started to move towards the door.

  “So, you don’t think that you will kill Vekal for what is inside of him? He will live?” Talon was saying slowly, his own arms lowering and the blade steadying towards the floor.

  “I think so,” Aldameda replied, “but first I have to conduct some tests on this herb and see how it works.” Her voice echoed as she wandered through the corridor beyond.

  Suriyen was left feeling oddly deflated and hopeful at the same time. “I guess that it is time that I told you about this place, if you want to stick around with me,” she said wearily to Talon.

  The boy nodded, looking at the racks of weapons and targets that filled the small courtyard around them.

  18

  “Friends! Pffft!” Ikrit burned with indignation inside of Vekal. One minute Vekal had been alone, landing on the overgrown bank of the canal, and the next the devil was fully present and large inside his mind. The sudden outburst of demonic presence made Vekal’s head throb with a buzzing headache.

  “Ach!” He staggered on the verge, almost falling into the canal, steadying his hands on the nearest wall for support. He had managed to get almost to the bend in the canal beside him, stumbling over rocks, reedy grass, and thin, scaled trees. On his nearest side were the containing walls of the houses and warehouses, and to his left the still, wide waters of a low canal river, sleepily filled with a few marsh birds. The far side was clouded by marsh grasses and reeds, and fringed from above by the dripping fronts of waterside trees. Beyond that, Vekal could make out the shape of still more houses, roads, carts, streets, and people.

  How far does this city go on for? Vekal thought to himself as he staggered and held his head like he had just woken up from a three-day drinking binge.

  “Not far enough, clearly,” the creature inside his head replied. Suddenly, a burst of energy exploded through his system as the devil lent him strength. “Here. We need to get further away from them before they decide to follow us.” With the increased vigor came a reckless feeling to the Sin Eater’s mind, reminiscent of some of the earlier experiences that he had whilst training at the Tower: illicit herbs and potions designed to make the Sin Eaters inexhaustible and unstoppable. In just a few moments, Vekal found that he was now running, all thought of pain gone as he approached a foot bridge which was busy with carts and people. A short climb and he was pounding his feet across the stone and dirt of the floor, weaving in between the riders and carts to get to the other side, and on up the street.

  “Left. There. That way, down that street,” the devil advised him as he ran, and Vekal found that he obeyed the creature’s insights almost unquestioningly. It was as if, finally, they were starting to meld into something that was greater than either of them.

  Or have I become a puppet? the Sin Eater thought as the devil guided his body down another side street. The streets in this part of the town were narrow and conflicting, sometimes only turning into a circular cul-de-sac or having fewer exits than entrances and vice versa. Centuries of city mismanagement and overcrowding were obviously to blame, and the cobbled streets had been dug up and built over, their ancient stones replanted once more and again.

  “Ha! If only!” Ikrit laughed inside of him. “If only you could be a gibbet then I wouldn’t have to put up with your eating and sleeping and moralizing!”

  Gibbet? Vekal wondered, watching as his body twisted and turned down another side street, and then another.

  “Demonic slang. A gibbet is a full zombie. A thing totally possessed by the creature that occupies it. From the gibbet, the rope used to hang people?”

  Vekal refused the imagined images of a body dancing on the end of a piece of rope, and willed his body to slow down, if only to prove to himself that he had any say over his body anymore. The devil had taken them deep into the old quarters of the city, up near the docks towards the Inner Sea. High over their head whirled strange, long-winged birds the like of which Vekal had never seen before.

  “Ha. See? You do have some will left in you,” Ikrit teased. “No, this unity is called the Seduction in our lore. It means the balancing of the host and the spirit. You are getting used to me inside of your mind, as I am getting used to you. We are becoming one. Soon, we shall enter the Damnation, when you and I will become one thing, one spirit, one creature, one mind.”

  Vekal didn’t want to become one mind with the spirit. He wanted to be free of the creature.

  “Ugh. You mortals and all of your silly scare stories. You forget everything when you take on the clothes of flesh. You forget what you are, what we are. Spirits. Creatures that move though the planes and the worlds. There are many things that you do not understand yet, Vekal, but I will teach you. Possession can be many things. At the start of any possession, when I was in the girl for instance, then my host might be a gibbet. I could exert my power to control them, but they would always be fighting me….’ Even the devil’s voice had seemed to soften in Vekal’s mind, becoming more like his own, less buzzy and full of pain.

  “But as the possession continues… then begin the stages of spirit mingling. We form something new, and something else. Unless, of course, we find a way to free me and allow me to jump into a worthier prospect.”

  Vekal frowned, hissed, and then found himself smirking. The arrogance of the creature was breathtakingly honest. He found that if the creature wasn’t completely evil, and relished pain and disorder, he might even find it funny.

  Better company perhaps then Suriyen and Aldameda, he thought wryly, feeling bad for leaving Talon in their care. But he also knew that they would look after him. It wasn’t the boy that they wanted to kill, it was him.

  “Friends! Gah. They make me sick.” The devil bickered inside of his head, as it urged him to head towards a narrow street where half was in shadow from the cloth awning
s of the shops and coffee houses. Strange smokes and fragrances hung in the air, and rangy street cats hissed at him as he passed their way.

  Who were they? Vekal chose a table in the shade, and nodded to the woman tender who gestured to the large cauldron of rich, spiced coffee. He wasn’t entirely sure how he was going to pay for this small piece of sustenance, but oddly found himself trusting the devil to come up with the answers as it had brought him to that place after all.

  “An ancient cult from the north west of here. They call themselves the Friends, but they are just a load of goat herders and drovers. Bull-worshipers. You saw their idol?” Ikrit sneered.

  Vekal had. A sort of goat-like bull type creature holding a wheel upon its back.

  “A few millennia ago they were just some herders, moving their flocks across the north to the Iron Pass, never getting there. A migration that would take them a hundred years. They were nomadic, lived with their flock, so started to have some very strange ideas about them.” This time the demon snickered, as the tender of the small café brought a tray to Vekal’s table, laden with a small china pot of coffee, an extra of cream, and a bowl of filled breads. She paused for a moment when he thanked her, looking at his face before nodding to herself, turning and leaving for the back. Outside, the city was starting to get dark, and Vekal wondered where he would sleep tonight, or if he would even stay in the city at all.

  “They protected their flocks from wolves and bears and lions and all of that sort of thing, and they acted as traveling midwives to any mewling baby that they come across in the communities that hosted them. Over the generations, they started to believe that all of the world, all life, was carried on the back of an eternally migrating bull. What pigswallop!”

  The devil cackled this time, and Vekal found himself smiling, coughing into the food as he ate it. A few of the patrons looked around, but when they saw the tortured flecks of white crisscrossing the dark skin, they hurriedly turned away.

  “Anyway. So somewhere on their travels they wound up killing one of ours. A devil. A demon. Some lucky chancer who managed to worm their way up into the Garden for a bit. Whilst we downstairs thought it little more than another piece of bad luck and all good fun, in just another few generations the herders had grown a whole religion!”

  Vekal sipped at the strong black coffee, feeling it tingle and burn as it hit his taste buds. Cinnamon and cardamom, hints of ginger and something else too, next to the bitter coffee.

  “They believed that the great herd or whatever they called it were under attack by us predators—the devils and demons and spirits of the underworld, come to destroy the whole wheel of life itself. They believe, as they are friends of the herd, that it is their job to protect it from us. So they then spent the next few hundred years trying to grub out every spirit, devil, and imp that they could. Even long after they had abandoned their real-life cattle, they still thought that they were all shepherds or guards or something crazy.”

  Vekal nodded. It made sense why Suriyen would take work as a caravan guard if that was her religion. It even explained why she had taken such a protective loyalty to the boy Talon and himself when they had met. Especially with her background—her family killed by Dal Grehb at the Iron Pass, and then becoming a slave. She would imagine that the whole world was under threat of attack at any time.

  And Vekal realized that he had another enemy in the city now, aside from the city itself. The gypsies that they had been traveling with would have arrived, and word would be spreading through the city to look for a Sin Eater, horribly scarred but still wearing his characteristic bandages, who had been involved in killing their matriarch. Anyone like the baker and the butcher who wanted to prove a point or to look tough in front of their customers could seek to harm him just for what he was, and now Vekal Morson mentally added Suriyen and Aldameda to that list. The Friends. He wondered just how many friends there even were in this city.

  “That doesn’t matter. None of that matters now,” Ikrit informed him, as a shadow loomed over his table. It was a man, tall and broad, with a hat like the northerners wore. A tightly-cropped beard, with hair pulled back and tucked under the brim of his broad hat. The man had on the clothes of a traveler or an ex-soldier, but a better class of one. A leather jacket instead of cuirass or body armor was worn over his tunic. A belt with finely tooled leather pouches affixed each with real brass buckles and not just bags with string. Finally, a pair of breeches made from studded hide, and a small blade at his side.

  “Can I help you?” Vekal asked.

  “I doubt it,” said the man, and in the very first moment of hearing the voice, Vekal also knew that he was not just talking to a man, he was talking to a demon as well.

  Have you betrayed me, Ikrit? Vekal stood up in a lurch, chair hitting the ground behind him with a clang, and both of his hands going to the daggers at his side. Before he could seize them and draw them out, however, Ikrit answered.

  “Stay your hand! No, this is planned, but not in the way you think.” Ikrit was chittering, and the buzzing had returned.

  It is scared of something. Vekal felt the devil’s emotions in the back of his own mind as clearly and as plainly as if he had felt them himself. In front of him, the stranger waited patiently, not moving, as if sensing Vekal’s inner torment. The other patrons were hurriedly backing away from what looked about to be a vicious and bloody argument.

  “This is a…. a colleague. Whom we have to see. Our kind comes here when we get to the surface,” and by surface, the Sin Eater knew that he meant the physical world, “to this spot and others throughout the world. We come here, and we… negotiate.”

  Some kind of drop-off point? Vekal frowned, not moving his hands from the hilts of the daggers, but nodding that the stranger could at least say his piece.

  “Wise choice, brother,” the man-devil’s voice buzzed, both in Vekal’s ears and at his mind. He cast a nervous glance around at the other disappearing customers, but no one seemed to have noticed the strange spectral burr to the man’s voice. Do I sound like that then? To others who can detect such things? But there was no time to ponder the intricacies of possession as the man nodded that they were to go inside the coffee lounge.

  Vekal wondered why he was even obeying this man-devil as it walked easily past the worried and nervous other clients of the darkened room, through the haze of smoke to a curtain at the rear of the room. The tender of the café was at her counter, studiously making more coffees and ignoring whatever the new arrivals might be doing. As if she were used to such a thing.

  Sweeping the curtain aside revealed a corridor and a set of steps to another curtain. Vekal wondered why he was following this stranger at all, watching as he moved easily and steadily to their destination. No sign of stiffness, no jerks or tremors to indicate that the human inside was fighting back from the spirit that controlled it.

  They came to the final room, which was little more than a warehouse cellar cut into the earth with the floor covered with a fine layer of sand. The stranger didn’t bother to light the torches as he stood in the center of the room and turned to face Vekal. Immediately, as soon as they had walked into the dark, the eldritch ab-light of the devil inside of him took over, overlaying everything with an eerie blue glow.

  Vekal could clearly make out the crates, barrels, and sacks of the shop’s supplies on either side, although they weren’t glowing in the same way as his own hand. When he looked at the stranger, however, he was stunned to see a burning, fiery inferno of blue, with veins of purple snaking through it. While concentrating as the devil inside, the human spoke.

  “Ikrit.” The man-devil laughed. “So you are here at last, eh?”

  “I always told you that I would get here,” Vekal found his mouth saying, without any awareness of opening it.

  “And now, strong Ikrit is lost, is that it? Foul, devious, mighty Ikrit has come to little me for help?” the large, impressive soldier said.

  Vekal found himself smirking despite the strange a
ct he was involved in. The voice of the purple light was nothing like the human that it inhabited. The purple imp made Vekal think of merchants, and politicians, and guilds.

  “You know what I am here for, Sadgast,” Vekal-Ikrit said.

  A choking laugh, as the purple flashed inside the creature. “I know. But I do not know whether you are the one to receive it. Who are you anyway, but another lost spirit, crawled out of a hole and waiting for any zealot with a bit of Devil’s Bane to send you back?” The man-devil presumably called Sadgast sneered. “And look at your host! A Sin Eater from Tir. I mean, very well done for picking a good specimen, well trained I am sure, but not very inconspicuous, is it?” Again the man-devil laughed, this time the man’s eyes creasing as he joined in the fun.

  Vekal felt Ikrit’s anger flare inside of him, and he wondered if he would help him or stop him to kill this man. Was the man holding Sadgast just as evil as the devil inside of him? Instead, when Ikrit found an answer to his dilemma, it was words that Ikrit chose.

  “You know what I am, Sadgast. I remember you as clutch brothers in the foul nests of the Below. I remember your screams of pain and cries of joy, just as you know of what I am capable. If you do not give it to me, then I will do what I should have done in the first place—come here at the head of an army of Menaali warriors, and burn this putrid little seaside resort to the ground! You will have heard the rumors of trouble in the desert, I am sure… This Sin Eater is proof. I have brought the Menaali to Tir, and I have taken Tir itself. You know what they will do, even without any of my aid. They will continue. They will ride or walk to the great trading city of Fuldoon and use every house as their own. Every one that stands in their way will be cut down, and every other used as their playthings.”

  “The Menaali have taken Tir?” Sadgast said, calculating.

  “Dal Grehb himself,” Ikrit responded. “I was in his daughter. So where else could he go to have me removed, than to the only people on the planet with a Sin Eater’s skills?”